In his book When Science Meets Religion, Ian Barbour suggests that traditional religious doctrines need to be reformulated in light of current science. It makes rational and theistic sense that if an involved and caring God created a law-bound universe, then these laws must have their origins in God’s Divine character. However, if you consider that some scientists sense the need to reformulate some of their own theories (like quantum mechanics) then you are trying to combine two moving or evolving targets.

According to scientist/theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, science and religion should not be looked at as independent sources of ideas. But as it stands, the traditional religious community believes God can violate the laws of nature (as in miracles) while scientists would find such an idea troublesome and illogical.

Swedenborg not only believed that scientists and theologians could have real points of contact and dialogue, but that religious belief and scientific knowledge could be brought into perfect harmony.

Unfortunately, one has to read a bookshelf’s worth of Swedenborg’s vast scientific and theological writings to straddle such an intellectual challenge.

I have done all this reading for you and woven it into my new book, Proving God. This book challenges the assumptions of both traditional religion and current scientific theory and offers a new theistic model of top-down causality that spans physical and non-physical realities.

For instance, current science has discovered that the universe consists of layered structures of existence. Swedenborg not only anticipated and wrote about the layered architecture of reality but also discovered this same top-down patterning principle cleverly contained within the actual stories of God’s Holy Word – making Scripture both a theological and scientific document!

This provides us with a plausible scientific theory of how every created thing in nature was created from God’s Word (John 1:1-3).

The interdependence, interconnectivity and interrelatedness of universal nature provide us with a visible theater, representative of God’s heavenly kingdom of mutual love! The lawful causal links between these distinct realms (that allow God to act in the world) are through correspondences and similitude.

Natural law is the physical analog and expression of spiritual law constrained by time and space. This relationship and symmetry makes miracles possible when spiritual laws fully manifest within spacetime (there is no violation of the natural law, but a spiritual augmentation of the law through the removal of constraints).

In the 21st Century, scientific discovery will take its cue from new spiritual revelations. Hold on to your hat!

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About thegodguy

EDWARD F. SYLVIA, M.T.S.
Philosopher/Theologian Edward F. Sylvia attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and received his Master of Theological Studies at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, CA and a Certificate of Swedenborgian Studies from the Swedenborgian House of Studies. He is a member of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (C.T.N.S.) and the Swedenborg Scientific Association (S.S.A.).
Award-winning author of "Sermon From the Compost Pile: Seven Steps Toward Creating An Inner Garden" and "Proving God," which fulfills a continuing vision that God’s fingerprints of love can be found everywhere in the manifest universe. His most recent book, "Swedenborg & Gurdjieff: The Missing Links" is an edgy collection of anti-intuitive essays for personal transformation that challenges and inspires.
He has been a student of the ideas of both Emanuel Swedenborg and George I. Gurdjieff for over thirty years. Read more about TheGodGuy, his books and his ideas at http://www.staircasepress.com